Natural Language and Its Ontology

Natural language, it appears, reflects in part our conception of the world. Natural language displays a great range of types of referential noun phrases that seem to stand for objects of various ontological categories and types, and it also involves constructions, categories, and expressions that appear to convey ontological or notions. Natural language reflects its own ontology, an ontology that may differ from the ontology a philosopher may be willing to accept or even a nonphilosopher when thinking about what there is, and of course it may differ from the ontology of what there really is. This chapter gives a characterization of the ontology implicit in natural language and the entities it involves, situates natural language ontology within metaphysics, discusses what sorts of data may be considered reflective of the ontology of natural language, and addresses Chomsky’s dismissal of externalist semantics.

Unbunking Arguments

This chapter develops a style of argument that realists can use to defend the methodological propriety of appealing to a given range of intuitions. Unbunking arguments are an epistemically positive analogue of debunking arguments, and they revolve around the claim that the processes dominantly responsible for beliefs about a given domain are reliable. However, processes cannot always be assessed for accuracy with respect to the relevant domain, so this chapter also develops the cross-domain strategy, which involves arguing that processes known to be reliable in one domain are similarly reliable with respect to a different domain. The chapter ends by unbunking our metaphysical intuitions about mutual supervenience by way of a cross-domain strategy that draws on cognitive scientific research into our ability to track correlations.

God and Cognitive Science

Putative evidence or arguments for God’s existence have been debated for millennia. In recent years some practitioners of cognitive science have applied evidence garnered from their research to support their favored view in the theism/atheism debate. The first part of this chapter examines and rejects several attempts to use cognitive scientific findings in support of theism, including a perception-based approach offered by Baker and Zimmerman (chap. 5, this volume). The present chapter then proceeds in the opposite direction, by illustrating how cognitive scientific evidence can be used in conjunction with Bayesian reasoning to lead a rational and open-minded metaphysician to lower his or her prior credence in God’s existence, even by a substantial amount.

On Perceiving God

This chapter focuses on a gap in existing cognitive scientific explanations of religion: although they may explain various religious beliefs, they are weak at explaining religious experiences—including the very perception-like experiences that believers often take as grounding their belief in God. The account argues that cognitive science of religion (CSR) to date provides neither the full-blown concept of a deity nor dedicated cognitive resources for arriving at the perception of one. The gap is not inevitable, however: it is shown how certain religious experiences could indeed qualify as direct perceptions of God, on a traditional model of perception. Moreover, one can explain how humans acquired the conceptual and computational resources to perceive supernatural beings by supposing that human beings have actually interacted with such beings in evolutionarily significant ways throughout history. The chapter closes with some epistemic implications of looking at CSR in this “reformed” way.

Time Lost, Time Regained

This chapter contends that cognitive science is crucially important to the metaphysics of time. Cognitive science reveals mechanisms that help us regain the time “lost” by physics, and in so doing, it indirectly confirms some metaphysical hypotheses. After a brief setup, the chapter describes the interplay between cognitive science and the three modes of time identified by Kant, namely, duration, succession and simultaneity. It then sketches the beginnings of a solution to one of the main puzzles in the metaphysics of time, the so-called flow of time. If this chapter is correct, the explanation of temporal flow demands an all-out interdisciplinary attack.

Cognitive Science for the Revisionary Metaphysician

Many philosophers insist that the revisionary metaphysician—i.e., the metaphysician who offers a metaphysical theory which conflicts with folk intuitions—bears a special burden to explain why certain folk intuitions are mistaken. This chapter shows how evidence from cognitive science can help the revisionist discharge this explanatory burden. Focusing on composition and persistence, it argues that empirical evidence indicates that the folk operate with a promiscuous teleomentalist view of composition and persistence. The folk view deserves to be debunked. This illustrates one key role cognitive science can play in metaphysics; namely by helping the revisionary metaphysician discharge the explanatory burden of providing a plausible explanation of how the folk have gone wrong.

Against Phenomenal Parsimony

Several authors deny that the senses of agency and of bodily ownership have distinctive phenomenology. This is in line with a general principle of phenomenal parsimony, according to which one should not posit additional phenomenal properties in one’s mental ontology when one can explain them by appealing to other properties. The crucial question is then to determine what reasons there can be to enrich our phenomenal ontology. This debate has recently turned to cognitive science to find answers. Those who defend a liberal or rich view of phenomenology have taken pathological disorders and illusions as evidence in favor of the existence of a distinctive phenomenology, but even in these borderline cases there is room for interpretation, and where the liberals see feelings, the proponents of a more conservative view see cognitive attitudes. The argument then becomes an inference to the best explanation. But whose side offers the best explanation?

Modal Prospection

Drawing together the metaphysics of counterfactuals with empirical work on intuitive judgments, this chapter discusses the nature of counterfactual reasoning about self-involving possibilities. It argues that when a person reasons about her self-involving possibilities, especially far-fetched possibilities, this reasoning may be supported by an underlying “self simulator,” a kind of mental engine with an approximate understanding of who she is, which enables her to learn about her preferences and make intuitive judgments and predictions about her self-involving possibilities. On this view, through observing or simulating their own choices, people understand themselves through a process similar to that by which they understand other people. In this way, they learn about their own beliefs and desires. The argument is informed by empirical data from surveys where lay people and philosophers decided what action they would take in vignettes involving a potentially transformative decision.

Cognitive Psychology and the Metaphysics of Meaning

This chapter distinguishes the clusters of psychologically real heuristics that govern our use of terms—the “psi-concepts”—from the “phi-concepts” or meanings that are the semantic determinants of the extensions of the terms in question, and hence of the truth-conditions of the sentences that contain those terms. Concerning the psi-concepts the chapter proposes a new, empirically motivated, and philosophically consequential amendment to both the theory-theory and the prototype theory, namely the generic encoding hypothesis: the heuristics which typically guide our use of terms by exploiting prevalence, cue-validity, and causal explanatory structure are properly formulated in generic terms. The chapter then explores the philosophical consequences of the generic encoding hypothesis, exploring its destructive impact on the method of cases (with particular attention to its use in the philosophy of personal identity), philosophical analysis, the “normativity of meaning,” and the idea that we know how to use terms by grasping meanings.

Moral Metaphysics, Moral Psychology, and the Cognitive Sciences

Morality, like language, is a ubiquitous feature of contemporary human societies. Both cases exhibit social variation as well as cross-cultural similarities, and individual acquisition of largely tacit abilities to communicate and cooperate spontaneously in an open-ended array of circumstances. Cognitive science has shed light on how this is possible in the case of language, but recently has challenged whether human morality could actually live up to the character it purports to have (e.g., objective and nonparochial) or the social role it purports to play (e.g., in guiding judgment, motivation, and practices). Realism about morality is seen as at odds with understanding it scientifically. Challenges have been based upon “dual-process” theories and evolutionary psychology. A defense of realism can be given, however, on the strength of research supporting a picture of the mind as engaged in non-egocentric as well as egocentric causal-evaluative modeling of the physical and social world.